African Stories Read online

  “I was nearly court-martialled.”

  “It was my fault,” said Michele. “I was drunk.”

  “I was responsible.”

  “How could you be responsible when I did it? But it is all over. Are you better?”

  “Well, I suppose those crosses saved your life.”

  “I did not think,” said Michele. “I was remembering the kindness of the Red Cross people when we were prisoners.”

  “Oh shut up, shut up, shut up.”

  “I have brought you a present.”

  The Captain peered through the dark. Michele was holding up a picture. It was of a native woman with a baby on her back smiling sideways out of the frame.

  Michele said: “You did not like the haloes. So this time, no haloes. For the Captain—no Madonna.” He laughed. “You like it? It is for you. I painted it for you.”

  “God damn you!” said the Captain.

  “You do not like it?” said Michele, very hurt.

  The Captain closed his eyes. “What are you going to do next?” he asked tiredly.

  Michele laughed again. “Mrs. Pannerhurst, the lady of the General, she wants me to paint her picture in her white dress. So I paint it.”

  “You should be proud to.”

  “Silly bitch. She thinks I am good. They know nothing—savages. Barbarians. Not you, Captain, you are my friend. But these people they know nothing.”

  The Captain lay quiet. Fury was gathering in him. He thought of the General’s wife. He disliked her, but he had known her well enough.

  “These people,” said Michele. “They do not know a good picture from a bad picture. I paint, I paint, this way, that way. There is the picture—I look at it and laugh inside myself.” Michele laughed out loud. “They say, he is a Michelangelo, this one, and try to cheat me out of my price. Michele—Michelangelo—that is a joke, no?”

  The Captain said nothing.

  “But for you I painted this picture to remind you of our good times with the village. You are my friend. I will always remember you.”

  The Captain turned his eyes sideways in his head and stared at the black girl. Her smile at him was half innocence, half malice.

  “Get out,” he said suddenly.

  Michele came closer and bent to see the Captain’s face. “You wish me to go?” He sounded unhappy. “You saved my life. I was a fool that night. But I was thinking of my offering to the Madonna—I was a fool, I say it myself. I was drunk, we are fools when we are drunk.”

  “Get out of here,” said the Captain again.

  For a moment the white bandage remained motionless. Then it swept downwards in a bow.

  Michele turned towards the door.

  “And take that bloody picture with you.”

  Silence. Then, in the dim light, the Captain saw Michele reach out for the picture, his white head bowed in profound obeisance. He straightened himself and stood to attention, holding the picture with one hand, and keeping the other stiff down his side. Then he saluted the Captain.

  “Yes, sir” he said, and he turned and went out of the door with the picture.

  The Captain lay still. He felt—what did he feel? There was a pain under his ribs. It hurt to breathe. He realized he was unhappy. Yes, a terrible unhappiness was filling him, slowly, slowly. He was unhappy because Michele had gone. Nothing had ever hurt the Captain in all his life as much as that mocking Yes, sir. Nothing. He turned his face to the wall and wept. But silently. Not a sound escaped him, for the fear the nurses might hear.

  The Trinket Box

  YES, but it was only recently, when it became clear that Aunt Maud really could not last much longer, that people began to ask all those questions which should have been asked, it seems now, so long ago.

  Or perhaps it is the other way about: Aunt Maud, suddenly finding that innumerable nieces and nephews and cousins were beginning to take an interest in her, asking her to meet interesting people, was so disturbed to find herself pushed into the centre of the stage where she felt herself to be out of place, that she took to her bed where she could tactfully die?

  Even here, lying on massed pillows, like a small twig that has been washed up against banks of smooth white sand, she is not left in peace. Distant relations who have done no more than send her Christmas cards once a year come in to see her, sit by her bed for hours at a time, send her flowers. But why? It is not merely that they want to know what London in the ’nineties was like for a young woman with plenty of money, although they wake her to ask: “Do tell us, do you remember the Oscar Wilde affair?” Her face puckers in a worried look, and she says: “Oscar Wilde? What? Oh yes, I read such an interesting book, it is in the library.”

  Perhaps Aunt Maud herself sees that pretty vivacious girl (there is a photograph of her in an album somewhere) as a character in a historical play. But what is that question which it seems everyone comes to ask, but does not ask, leaving at length rather subdued, even a little exasperated—perhaps because it is not like Aunt Maud to suggest unanswerable questions?

  Where did it all begin? Some relation returned from a long holiday, and asking casually after the family said: “What! Aunt Maud still alive? Isn’t she gone yet?” Is that how people began asking: “Well, but how old is she? Eighty? Ninety?”

  “Nonsense, she can’t be ninety.”

  “But she says she remembers . . .” And the names of old “incidents” crop up, the sort of thing one finds in dusty books of memoirs. They were another world. It seems impossible that living people can remember them, especially someone we know so well.

  “She remembers earlier than that. She told me once—it must be twenty years ago now—of having left home years before the Boer War started. You can work that out for yourself.”

  “Even that only makes her seventy—eighty perhaps. Eighty is not old enough to get excited about.”

  “The Crimean War . . .” But now they laugh. “Come, come, she’s not a hundred!”

  No, she cannot be as much as that, but thirty years ago, no less, an old frail lady climbed stiffly but jauntily up the bank of a dried-up African river, where she was looking after a crowd of other people’s children on a picnic, and remarked: “My old bones are getting creaky.” Then she bought herself an ancient car. It was one of the first Ford models, and she went rattling in it over the bad corrugated roads and even over the veld, if there were no roads. And no one thought it extraordinary. Just as one did not think of her as an old maid, or a spinster, so one did not think of her as an old lady.

  And then there was the way she used to move from continent to continent, from family to family, as a kind of unpaid servant. For she had no money at all by then: her brother the black sheep died and she insisted on giving up all her tiny capital to pay his debts. It was useless of course; he owed thousands, but no one could persuade her against it. “There are some things one has to do,” she said. Now, lying in bed she says: “One doesn’t want to be a nuisance,” in her small faded voice; the same voice in which she used to announce, and not so very long ago: “I am going to South America as companion to Mrs. Fripp—she is so very very kind.” For six months, then, she was prepared to wait hand and foot on an old lady years younger than herself simply for the sake of seeing South America? No, we can no longer believe it. We are forced to know that the thought of her aches and pains put warmth into Mrs. Fripp’s voice when she asked Aunt Maud to go with her.

  And from the Andes or the Christmas Islands, or some place as distant and preposterous as the Russian-Japanese war or the Morocco scramble seem to be in time, came those long long letters beginning: “That white dressing-jacket you gave me was so useful when I went to the mountains.” She got so many presents from us all that now we feel foolish. They were not what she wanted, after all.

  Then, before we expected it, someone would write and say: “By the way, did you know I have had Aunt Maud with me since Easter?” So she had come back from the Andes, or wherever it was? But why had she gone there? Was Anne having another ba
by perhaps?

  Sitting up in bed surrounded by the cushions and photographs that framed her in the way other people’s furniture frame them, always very early in the morning—she wrote letters from five to seven every day of her life—she answered in her tiny precise handwriting: “Jacko’s leg is not quite healed yet, although I think he is well on the way to recovery. And then I shall be delighted to avail myself of your kind offer. I will be with you by the middle of . . .” Punctually to the hour she would arrive: the perfect guest. And when she left, because of the arrival of a baby or a sudden illness perhaps five hundred miles away or in another country, with what affectionate heart-warming gratitude she thanked us, until it was easy to forget the piles of mending, the delicious cooking, the nights and nights of nursing. A week after she had left would arrive the inevitable parcel, containing presents so apt that it was with an uneasy feeling that we sat down to write thanks. How did she come to know our most secret wants? And, imperceptibly, the unease would grow to resentment. She had no right, no right at all, to give such expensive presents when she was dependent on relations for her support.

  So it was that after every visit a residue of spite and irritation remained. And perhaps she intended that the people she served should never have to feel the embarrassment of gratitude? Perhaps she intended us—who knows?—to think as we sat writing our thank-yous: But after all, she has to live on us, it is after all a kindness to feed and house her for a few weeks.

  It is all intolerable, intolerable; and it seems now that we must march into that bedroom to ask: “Aunt Maud, how did you bear it? How could you stand, year in and year out, pouring out your treasures of affection to people who hardly noticed you? Do you realize, Aunt Maud, that now, thirty years or more after you became our servant, it is the first time that we are really aware you were ever alive? What do you say to that, Aunt Maud? Or did you know it all the time . . .” For that is what we want to be sure of: that she did not know it, that she never will.

  We wander restlessly in and out of her room, watching that expression on her face which—now that she is too ill to hide what she feels—makes us so uneasy. She looks impatient when she sees us; she wishes we would go away. Yesterday she said: “One does not care for this kind of attention.”

  All the time, all over the house, people sit about, talking, talking, in low urgent voices, as if something vital and precious is leaking away as they wait.

  “She cant be exactly the same, it is impossible!”

  “But I tell you, I remember her on the day the war started—the old war, you know. On the platform, waving goodbye to my son. She was the same, wrinkle for wrinkle. That little patch of yellow on her cheek—like an egg-stain. And those little mauveish eyes, and that funny little voice. People don’t talk like that now, each syllable sounding separately.”

  “Her eyes have changed though.” We sneak in to have a look at her. She turns them on us, peering over the puffs of a pink bed-jacket—eyes where a white film is gathering. Unable to see us clearly, afraid—she who has sat by so many death-beds—of distressing us by her unsightliness, she turns away her head, lies back, folds her hands, is silent.

  When other people die, it is a thing of horror, swellings, gross flesh, smells, sickness. But Aunt Maud dies as a leaf shrivels. It seems that a little dryish gasp, a little shiver, and the papery flesh will crumble and leave beneath the bedclothes she scarcely disturbs a tiny white skeleton. That is how she is dying, giving the least possible trouble to the niece who waited sharp-sightedly for someone else to use the phrase “a happy release” before she used it herself. “She might not eat anything, but one has to prepare the tray all the same. And then, there are all these people in the house.”

  “Before she retired, what did she do?”

  “Taught, didn’t you know? She was forty when her father married again, and she went out and took a post in a school. He never spoke one word to her afterwards.”

  “But why, why?”

  “He was in the wrong of course. She didn’t marry so as to look after him.”

  “Oh, so she might have married? Who was he?”

  “Old John Jordan, do you remember?”

  “But he died before I left school—such a funny old man!”

  Impossible to ask why she never married. But someone asks it. A great-niece, very young, stands beside the bed and looks down with shivering distaste at such age, such death: “Aunt Maud, why did you never marry?”

  “Marry! Marry! Who is talking about marrying?” she sounds angered and sullen; then the small eyes film over and she says: “Who did you say is getting married?”

  The niece is banished and there are no more questions.

  No more visitors either, the doctor says. A question of hours. A few hours, and that casket of memories and sensations will have vanished. It is monstrous that a human being who has survived miraculously and precariously so many decades of wars, illnesses and accidents should die at last, leaving behind nothing.

  Now we sit about the bed where she lies and wait for her to die. There is nothing to do. No one stirs. We are all sitting, looking, thinking, surreptitiously touching the things that belonged to her, trying to catch a glimpse, even for a moment, of the truth that will vanish in such a little while.

  And if we think of the things that interested her, the enthusiasms we used to laugh at, because it seemed so odd that such an old lady should feel strongly about these great matters, what answer do we get? She was a feminist, first and foremost. The Pankhursts, she said, “were so devoted.” She was a socialist; she had letters from Keir Hardie. There had been no one like him since he died. She defended vegetarians, but would not be one herself, because it gave people so much trouble in the kitchen. Madame Curie, Charles Lindbergh, Marie Corelli, Lenin, Clara Butt—these were her Idols, and she spoke of them in agitated defiance as if they were always in need of defence. Inside that tiny shrivelled skull what an extraordinary gallery of heroes and heroines. But there is no answer there. No matter how hard we try, fingering her handkerchief sachet, thinking of the funny flat hats she wore, draped with bits of Liberty cottons, remembering how she walked, as if at any moment she might be called upon to scale a high wall, she eludes us. Let us resign ourselves to it and allow her to die.

  Then she speaks, after such long hours of waiting it is as if a woman already dead were speaking. Now, now!! We lean forward, waiting for her to say just that one thing, the perfect word of forgiveness that will leave us healed and whole.

  She has made her will, she says, and it is with the lawyer “who has always been so kind” to her. She has nothing to leave but a few personal trinkets . . . The small precise voice is breathless, and she keeps her eyes tight shut. “I have told my lawyer that my possessions, such as they are, are kept in my black trinket box in the cupboard there. He knows. Everything is in order. I put everything right when people became so kind and I knew I was ill.”

  And that is the last thing she will ever say. We wait intently, shifting our feet and avoiding each other’s eyes for fear that our guilty glances may imprint upon our memories of her the terrible knowledge let slip in the order of the words of that final sentence. We do not want to remember her with guilt, oh no! But although we wait, straining, nothing else comes; she seems to be asleep, and slowly we let our limbs loosen and think of the black box. In it we will find the diaries, or the bundle of letters which will say what she refuses to say. Oh most certainly we will find something of that sort. She cannot die like this, leaving nothing. There will be evidence of a consumed sorrow, at the least, something that will put substance into this barrenness. And when at last we look up, glancing at our watches, we see there is a stillness in the tiny white face which means she is dead.

  We get up, rather stiffly, because of the hours of sitting, and then after a decent interval open the black box. It is full to the brim with bits of lace and ribbon, scraps of flowery stuffs, buckles, braid, brooches, cheap glass necklaces. Each has a bit of paper pinned to it.
“These buttons I thought would do for the frock Alice was making when I was there last month.” And: “To little Robin with my fond love. I bought this glass peacock in Cape Town in 1914 for another little boy.” And so on, each of us has something. And when we come to the end and search for the diaries and letters there is nothing! Secretively each of us taps at the wood of the bottom—but no, it is solid. And we put back the things and we feel for the first time that Aunt Maud is dead. We want to cry. We would, if it were not absurd to cry for an old woman whom none of us wanted. What would she say if she saw those tears? “One cannot help feeling it would have been more useful to feel for me when I was still alive”? No, she would never say a thing like that; but we can have no illusions now, after that last remark of hers, which revealed the Aunt Maud she had been so carefully concealing all these years. And she would know we were not weeping for her at all.

  We cannot leave the black box. We finger the laces, stroke the wood. We come back to it again and again, where it lies on the table in the room in which she is waiting for the funeral people. We do not look at her, who is now no more than a tiny bundle under the clothes. And slowly, slowly, in each of us, an emotion hardens which is painful because it can never be released. Protest, is that what we are feeling? But certainly a protest without bitterness, for she was never bitter. And without pity, for one cannot imagine Aunt Maud pitying herself. What, then, is left? Are we expected to go on, for the rest of our lives (which we hope will be as long as hers) feeling this intolerable ache, a dull and sorrowful rage? And if we all feel, suddenly, that it is not to be borne, and we must leap up from our chairs and bang our fists against the wall screaming: “No, no! It can’t all be for nothing!”—then we must restrain ourselves and remain quietly seated; for we can positively hear the scrupulous little voice saying: “There are some things one does not do.”

  Slowly, slowly, we become still before the box, and now it seems that we hold Aunt Maud in the hollow of our palms. That was what she was; now we know her.